Newsletter

Newsletter

With breaking news of the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, this second newsletter of 2020 proves that nothing stands still just because we are all working from home. These updates are published on 22 May, which just happens to be the UN International Day for Biological Diversity. In this context, our CEO Christos Arvanitidis' comments that "it is clear that biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and the climate crisis are organically connected and this is where LifeWatch ERIC can play a pivotal role in supplying evidence-based synthetic knowledge and nature-based solutions to societal challenges," are particularly relevant.

LifeWatch ERIC has become part of an ESFRI initiative to aggregate services offered by Research Infrastructures and identify viable science-based solutions to the Covid-19 pandemic; Service Centre Director Alberto Basset and CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda contributed to a paper that emphasises how Research Infrastructures are key tools in addressing environmental challenges; the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone has incorporated two legacy databases on Compositae and Marine and Nonmarine Genera, and the Infrastructure's Twitter channel has launched polls and sparked debate on how researchers are dealing with the lockdown.